I don't think micropayments are going to work in anything like their present form. I do not want to be pestered about "is it okay to spend half a cent on X?" or "Subscriptions to Y cost only $12 a year" kind of stuff. That's too much cognitive overload. If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it, they might have something I'd use. But the whole "not pester" thing is at odds with what a lot of sites want to accomplish. For example, a web agent that was only authorized to spend five bucks a month would regard any site containing links that cost more than a penny as too expensive a place to be - and after it discovered this, I'd want it to reformat pages returned from search engines etc to de-emphasize those links and the text about the site. If the agent thinks it's too expensive, it sure as hell shouldn't be on the first page of search results - at least not the first page of search results the agent shows me. Conversely, if the web agent is not authorized to spend money, then sites supported by micropayments ought to be cut completely out of search engine results, and links to them found elsewhere ought to behave as "dead links" as far as my browser is concerned. I never EVER want to have to remember a username and password for a site supported by micropayments -- again, the cognitive load is too high for the piffling amounts we're talking about. My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every ten seconds on the site. Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're not going to get into the altavista database, for example. So if you want the site to be in a search engine at all, you're going to have to let the search engine's robot cruise the site for free. Wanna bet it would be about twenty seconds before somebody released a "Pretend to be a web spider and browse pay sites for FREE!" utility? Bear